Almighty God, help us to
hear the call of Christ the King and to follow in his service, whose kingdom
has no end; for he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, one glory.
Amen.
Today is an interesting liturgical day, known as Christ
the King Sunday. In 1925, in the face of rising secularism and questions around
the Church’s authority, Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast day as an assertion
of Jesus’ lordship over all of Creation. And it’s not a bad idea to have a
liturgical remembrance of this belief. Kings, of course, own all the land in
the kingdom, decree all the laws, maintain order, and judge on all issues of
justice. We often read about Jesus in a variety of roles in the Bible- prophet,
teacher, healer, and Messiah. But the idea of a king is a bit foreign to us. Kings
are so… un-American. In a democratic nation, kings can seem a bit antiquated,
and even unfair- why should someone deserve to be royalty just based on who
their parents were? So it is good for us to spend a day considering the fact that
Christ is King.
Christ the King Sunday is also the last Sunday of the
liturgical year. Next Sunday will mark a new year in the Church. And so today
is also an opportunity to consider what has happened in the past year. We can
give thanks for the blessings of the past year, and we can also make some
resolutions for the new Church year. How would you like to be involved at St.
Luke’s in the next year? What ministries do you feel called to be a part of?
What sort of prayer life would you like to have?
There are some churches that pay no attention to the
liturgical year, and that’s too bad for them because there is a richness to
marking our lives with the holy cycles of the Church. When we celebrate New
Year’s on January 1, we often start the year with new intentions, but we also
think of the regrets of the past year. We can have a tendency to get stuck in
the past. In the Creed, we say that “we believe in the forgiveness of sins.”
But how often do we define people by their mistakes? It has been said that we
prefer to judge others by their actions, and ourselves by our intentions. That
is not forgiveness. We are also our own harshest critics, hanging onto our resentments
as if they are our most valued possessions.
But there is wisdom in the notion of starting a new year
afresh in the church. There is a wonderful prayer that comes from Evening
Prayer in the New Zealand Prayer Book. I’ll read a portion of it, and as I do,
replace the word “day” with “year” in your listening: “It is night after a long
day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been
done. Let it be. Let us look expectantly to a new day, new joys, new
possibilities.” Amen.
Let us celebrate the kingship of Jesus by taking
seriously the salvation that he gives us from our past. Christ is the one who
forgives us our sins, who makes all things new, and gives us our identity as
the beloved children of God through Baptism. I’ve heard from a lot of you that
the past year was a rough one in the life of St. Luke’s. But it is over, so let
us not allow the past have any more power over us. It is a new year. And this
is something I need to hear too. I haven’t spoken much about it, but the last
year or so at St. Francis was rough. I don’t want to get into airing grievances,
but let’s just say that we both experienced struggles with leadership. I, too,
need to let be what has happened, and thank God for what is now.
CS Lewis, in The
Screwtape Letters, wrote that when we fall into temptation and live in sin
we are either lustfully looking toward the future, or are stuck in the past.
But he notes that the present is the place where time touches eternity; it is the
only place in which we can have a relation with God. So if we are not able to
live in the present moment, we are not able to receive the grace of God, or
partake in Christ’s Kingship. This is the last Sunday of this Church year, let
us leave it in the past and move forward into the grace that is waiting to be
found all around us.
Moving on, I’d like to consider what it means to have
Christ as our King. It is interesting that the metaphors used in today’s
Scripture readings are actually not that of a king, but that of a shepherd.
This is our first clue that Christ is not the same sort of king that we are
accustomed to. But as we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks, this is to be
expected, as the Kingdom of God is unlike the kingdoms of this world. God’s
Kingdom operates under a different sort of justice, where forgiveness and reconciliation
are always possible. God’s economy has a different sort of currency and
valuation than the world’s. The peace of God is achieved through love and
mercy, unlike the sarcastic peace of the Empire which is achieved through swords
and drones. And as today’s parable shows us, our allegiance to the Kingdom of
God is not achieved by paying tribute to the Emperor or saying some pledge of
allegiance, but instead comes through our actions.
Most kings tend to isolate themselves from the general
populace. We have images in our minds of kings and queens living in castles
with moats around them. They sit on thrones all day while someone peels their
grapes for them. Perhaps they occasionally look out a window from their ivory
tower, but they are unaffected by the affairs and conditions of their subjects.
But Christ’s Kingship is different. “Just as you have done it to the least of
these, you have done it to me.” This is a different sort of King. This King
Jesus is affected by our actions. He feels our pains, knows our rejections, and
suffers alongside us.
This parable has always haunted me because it says that what
we don’t do is perhaps more important than what we do do. Humanity is made in
the image of God, and in each of us, there exists a glimpse of the fullness of
God. That alone should be enough to make us mindful of the divinity of the human
soul that we encounter in each other. But Jesus’ words today raise the stakes
even more. How we treat others is how we treat our Creator. It’s fairly easy to
see the image of God in people that we know and like. It is easy to show our
love for God in the way we relate to our friends. Now that I am again serving a
downtown parish, I am reminded of the very real fact that many of our brothers
and sisters are living on our city streets. And when I see them, I am absolutely
haunted by the fact that our society, and my complicity in our class system,
has made it such that God has to spend cold nights on a bench. The parish I
served in DC was across the street from the White House, and as I would get off
the subway near the church, I was always struck by the number of homeless
people that lived in the shadow of our democracy. And that is not a political
statement, I was there for parts of both the Bush and Obama administrations.
But that
is not the model of Christ the King. Lest we turn the Gospel into law, we
should not read this parable as a command to start a prison ministry, soup
kitchen, or warming shelter- though those would certainly be good things to do.
Notice that Jesus does not suggest that doing these things, such as visiting
the sick and clothing the naked, is our ticket to Heaven. Instead, this is a
parable about Christ’s presence with all of us, but especially the least of
these, and how we respond to that presence.
Both groups, when they are judged for their actions and
inactions, are surprised to learn that they have been serving and neglecting
their king. This is not a parable only about the homeless and hungry, but about
the neglected. Who is it that our society overlooks? At least to me, it is
absolutely abhorrent that we can find the $6 trillion dollars it has cost to
fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we somehow can’t find the resources to
care for homeless and mentally and physically wounded soldiers who fought those
wars. They are neglected, and they are the least of these. Single mothers and
fathers are neglected by an economic system that refuses to support them. Immigrants
are being forgotten by a dysfunctional Congress that has forgotten that we are
a nation of immigrants. Though the tide is thankfully changing, homosexual
couples have been banished from the blessings and joys of marriage. And sometimes
it is even the well-off who are the least of these. There are some very wealthy
people in this country who use their money for good and noble purposes, yet are
judged as being part of the elitist 1%, even though they are very generous
people. And I am positive that I am forgetting other groups of people- those
are the least of these with whom Jesus is present.
We’re pretty good at being nice to others at church, or
when we’re doing church type things, such as outreach activities. However, this
is a parable about what happens when we think God isn’t around. My favorite
Christmas movie, and it’s almost time to start watching those, is It’s a Wonderful Life. I hope many of
you have seen it and will get the reference, but if you haven’t, do yourself a
favor and watch it. In the movie, the main character, George Bailey, gets a unique
opportunity to see what the world, or at least his town, would look like if he
had never been born. It was an eye opening experience for him in which he learns
that what we do matters. This parable of the final judgment of the sheep and
the goats says “how you treat others matters.”
Today is the final Sunday of our Stewardship campaign,
and how you respond matters in Stewardship as well. Have you been able to
exercise your control over your money by planning to give some of it away? Have
you committed to helping St. Luke’s be the best that we can be? What does your
pledge say about your relationship with Christ the King? When Pope Pius XI was
instituting this Feast day, which would later be adopted by Protestant
denominations, he wrote “if Christ our Lord is given all power and authority on
earth… it must be clear that not one of our faculties is exempt from his
empire.” And this is certainly true of our treasures, whether they be great or
small.
The parable that we have today is asking the question:
what type of steward are you? We have been blessed by God with relationships in
which to show forth God’s love, with opportunities to spread the Good News of
the Gospel, with time in which to experience the present grace of God, and with
money to align our priorities with the priorities of God’s Kingdom. In just a
few moments, we will have a special Prayers of the People which takes seriously
our privilege and duty to be stewards of God’s bounty.
As we are on the cusp of Thanksgiving Day, and have been
considering how we might respond to God’s blessings, I want to make sure that
you all know how incredibly thankful I am for each and every one of you. These
eleven weeks that we’ve had together so far have been, in every sense of the
word, awesome. I have never been so happy or fulfilled as I have been since
September. And the reason for this joy is this wonderful community of St. Luke’s.
I have been inspired by the dedication of so many of you to the vitality of
this parish, I have been humbled by the overwhelming sense of hospitality that
you greeted us with, and I have been honored to serve as your priest. So far,
the response to our Stewardship efforts has been superb, and I hope that each
of you, if you haven’t yet offered a pledge before the altar, will do so soon. Not just because we’d like to
know what sort of growth to plan for in the budget, but so that you might find
the joys and salvation of practicing stewardship and showing allegiance to
Christ our King.
As we close this liturgical year, we give God thanks for
what has past, but we leave the chains of the past in the past. We celebrate
and affirm that, indeed, Christ is King. His Kingship is one that looks
different from the rest of world, as Jesus is not to be found distant and
removed in the heavens, but is with each and every one of us, and especially
the least of these who are neglected and forgotten in our culture. Our task as
citizens of God’s Kingdom is to minster to our King through each other. And one
of the ways that we do this holy work is through Stewardship, making sure that
our priorities align with our budget. As today’s hymn proclaims “Crown him the
Lord of heaven, enthroned in worlds above; crown him the King, to whom is given,
the wondrous name of Love. Crown him with many crowns, as thrones before him
fall, crown him, ye kings, with many crowns, for he is King of all.”
